All bright and sunny out. Damn.

Had a hard time sleeping last night, finally powered down around 4:30am. Woke up at 11:30am and Riss and I went to our favorite café and fueled up. I read Dave’s post today, and he hit the nail right on the head. Days are smearing one into the next, all time perspective has been set askew. Kind of like a dream.

Dave was slated to start with his “Left to Lose” guitars, so I could come in just a little later. Got in at 2pm and Dave was rocking the SG on the verse parts, as Stephen and Chris looked on. It’s cool how everybody is usually here all the time to show support and keep the band vibe alive through the whole process.

The forecast is for more rain, I sure hope it comes, and if so, hope it does tomorrow on our day off, I want to enjoy it.

Dave turned the lights down in the control room and went to work on the solo and the new outro section. While we were tracking the song, Dave all of a sudden said “guys, start jamming, I have an idea”, and now there is this great live jam after the song has finishes. Dave took a few passes at the end solo. He seemed like he had a blast playing it and you can hear it.

Next on the agenda was “She Won’t Last”. After we chilled a bit, Dave started in on the verse. His part is a hypnotic part that’s U2-styled. He, Gummo, and Marc spent some time getting a tone and a delay setting so the delay repeats kind of syncopate and swirl together. Dave tweaked his part and it has more of a sadness and depth to it now. He tracked it initially with Marc’s Gibson ES 135. It was good, but missing something...This lead us down a tone search superhighway for about an hour. Sometimes in the studio the hunt for the elusive "sound in the head" can be pretty time consuming and maddening when it doesn't show up right away, but is a necessary part of the process. We had a great tone with the Gibson, but there was a clear glassy top end vibe that was missing. It turned out that one track of the Gibson and one track of the vintage Strat did the trick. After hearing the bass intro over and over in this process, Chris decided to re-do his part. He went for a super low, D-tuned sound. We listened to our original Danny Saber demo once to remind us of the cool initial approach we had used to start the song.

We broke for dinner and watched some more Metallica “Some Kind of Monster”. I am taking this baby home with me tonight so Riss and I can check it out tomorrow. Tomorrow we plan on catching up on all the TV I have missed this week: 2 American Idols, an Apprentice, and a Battlestar Galactica. By the way, BG is my new favorite show. Watched the mini-series just to check it out a little while back and loved it. Got way hooked. Smart, inventive, really well acted, it’s got it all. It accomplishes what is practically impossible: being a believable, relevant, and exciting science fiction show on television.

After dinner, our friend Mark Racco brought by a rough cut of a live video he shot of “Said You’d Be” from the manager showcase last week. When it is done, we’ll put it up for everybody on the Panic Site.

We had a lot of fun tonight brainstorming on “She Won’t Last”. Dave did his louder 2nd verse guitars, then we put down some real Silverlake-y bridge parts down. Used the Gretch, The Gibson 135, and Phil’s Telecaster. All really cool, vintage type sounds that don’t appear anywhere else in the song. The idea is a whole “scene change” in the bridge, right before the solo. Dave made a wind noise in my ear during playback, and I don’t know if he was joking or not, but it gave me the idea of a sound I want to put in the first verse, I describe it as “medical distance”. Marc Vangool got to work on the computer trying to create a loop or sound of …“medical distance”. I could describe further what that supposed to indicate, but I like those two words alone. Gummo was feeling pretty burnt after 6 straight 12-14 hour days tracking, so we took off at midnight for our precious day off.